That was the Stoner way.
The Ordinator carefully replaced the wedding gun in its box. ‘According to Resurgam law,’ she began, ‘the marriage is now formalised. You may—’
Which was when the perfume hit Janequin’s birds.
The woman who had uncapped the amber jar was gone, her seat glaringly vacant. Fragrant, autumnal, the odour from the jar made Sylveste think of crushed leaves. He wanted to sneeze.
Something was wrong.
The room flashed turquoise blue, as if a hundred pastel fans had just opened. Peacocks’ tails, springing open. A million tinted eyes.
The air turned grey.
‘Get down!’ Girardieau screamed. He was scrabbling madly at his neck. There was something hooked in it, something tiny and barbed. Numbly, Sylveste looked at his tunic and saw half a dozen comma-shaped barbs clinging to it. They had not broken the fabric, but he dared not touch them.
‘Assassination tools!’ Girardieau shouted. He slumped under the table, dragging Sylveste and his daughter with him. The auditorium was chaos now, a frenzied mass of agitated people trying to escape.
‘Janequin’s birds were primed!’ Girardieau said, virtually screaming in Sylveste’s ear. ‘Poison darts — in their tails.’
‘You’re hit,’ Pascale said, too stunned for her voice to carry much emotion. Light and smoke burst over their heads. They heard screams. Out of the corner of his eye, Sylveste saw the perfume woman holding a sleekly evil pistol in a two-handed grip. She was dousing the audience with it, its fanged barrel spitting cold pulses of boser energy. The float-cams swept round her, dispassionately recording the carnage. Sylveste had never seen a weapon like the one the woman used. He knew it could not have been manufactured on Resurgam, which left only two possibilities. Either it had arrived from Yellowstone with the original settlement, or it had been sold by Remilliod, the trader who had passed through the system since the coup. Glass — Amarantin glass that had survived ten thousand centuries — broke shrilly above. Like pieces of shattered toffee, it crashed down in jagged shards into the audience. Sylveste watched, powerless, as the ruby planes buried themselves in flesh, like frozen lightning. The terrified were already screaming loud enough to drown out the cries of those in pain.
What remained of Girardieau’s security team was mobilising, but terribly slowly. Four of the militia were down, their faces punctured by the barbs. One had reached the seating, struggling with the woman who had the gun. Another was opening fire with his own sidearm, scything through Janequin’s birds.
Girardieau meanwhile was groaning. His eyes were rolling, bloodshot, hands grasping at thin air.
‘We have to get out of here,’ Sylveste said, shouting in Pascale’s ear. She seemed still dazed from the neural transfer, blearily oblivious to what was happening.
‘But my father…’
‘He’s gone.’
Sylveste eased Girardieau’s dead weight onto the cold floor of the temple, careful to keep behind the safety of the table.
‘The barbs were meant to kill, Pascale. There’s nothing we can do for him. If we stay, we’ll just end up following him.’
Girardieau croaked something. It might have been ‘Go’, or it might only have been a final senseless exhalation.
‘We can’t leave him!’ Pascale said.
‘If we don’t, his killers end up winning.’
Tears slashed her face. ‘Where can we go?’
He looked around frantically. Smoke from concussion shells was filling the chamber, probably from Girardieau’s own people. It was settling in lazy pastel spirals, like scarves tossed from a dancer. Just when it was almost too dark to see, the room plunged into total blackness. The lights beyond the temple had obviously been turned off, or destroyed.
Pascale gasped.
His eyes slipped into infrared mode, almost without him having to think about it.
‘I can still see,’ he whispered to her. ‘As long as we stay together, you don’t have to worry about the darkness.’
Praying that the danger from the birds was gone, Sylveste rose slowly to his feet. The temple glowed in grey-green heat. The perfume woman was dead, a fist-sized hot hole in her side. Her amber jar was smashed at her feet. He guessed it had been some kind of hormonal trigger, keyed to receptors Janequin had put in the birds. He had to have been part of it. He looked — but Janequin was dead. A tiny dagger sat in his chest, trailing hot rivulets down his brocade jacket.
Sylveste grabbed Pascale and shoved her along the ground towards the exit, a vaulted archway gilded with Amarantin figurines and bas-relief graphicforms. It seemed that the perfume woman had been the only assassin actually present, if one discounted Janequin. But now her friends were entering, garbed in chameleoflage. They wore close-fitting breather masks and infrared goggles.
He pushed Pascale behind a jumble of upturned tables.
‘They’re looking for us,’ he hissed. ‘But they probably think we’re already dead.’
Girardieau’s surviving security people had fallen back and taken up defensive positions, kneeling within the fan-shaped auditorium. It was no match: the newcomers carried much heavier weapons, heavy boser-rifles. Girardieau’s militia countered with low-yield lasers and projectile weapons, but the enemy were cutting them apart with blithe, impersonal ease. At least half the audience were unconscious or dead; they had caught the brunt of the peacock venom salvo. Hardly the most surgically precise of assassination tools, those birds — but they had been allowed into the auditorium completely unchecked. Sylveste observed that two were still alive, despite what he had at first imagined. Still triggered by trace molecules of the perfume which remained aloft, their tails were flicking open and shut like the fans of nervous courtesans.
‘Did your father carry a weapon?’ Sylveste said, instantly regretting his use of the past tense. ‘I mean, since the coup.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Pascale said.
Of course not; Girardieau would never have confided such a thing to her. Quickly Sylveste felt around the man’s still body, hoping to find the padded hardness of a weapon beneath his ceremonial clothes.
Nothing.
‘We’ll have to do without,’ Sylveste said, as if the stating of this fact would somehow alleviate the problem it encapsulated. ‘They’re going to kill us if we don’t run,’ he said, finally.
‘Into the labyrinth?’
‘They’ll see us,’ Sylveste said.
‘But maybe they won’t think it’s us,’ Pascale said. ‘They might not know you can see in the dark.’ Though she was effectively blind, she managed to look him square in the face. Her mouth was open, an almost circular vacancy of expression or hope. ‘Let me say goodbye to my father first.’
She found his body in the darkness, kissed him for the last time. Sylveste looked to the exit. At that moment the soldier guarding it was hit by a shot from what remained of Girardieau’s militia. The masked figure crumpled, his body heat pooling liquidly into the floor around his body, spreading smoky white maggots of thermal energy into the stonework.
The way was clear, for the moment. Pascale found his hand and together they began to run.
EIGHT
‘I take it you’ve heard the news concerning the Captain,’ Khouri said, when the Mademoiselle coughed discreetly from behind her. Other than the Mademoiselle’s illusory presence, she was alone in her quarters, digesting what Volyova and Sajaki had told her of the mission.